The Greatest Show on Earth

How a Literature Festival Became a Force in Cultural Diplomacy

If you want to know what is going on in the world of culture, the best place to be is the Jaipur Literature Festival, which takes place every January in the capital of Rajasthan, India. Begun nineteen years ago on the margins of a crafts fair by Namita Gokhale, William Dalrymple, and Sanjoy Roy, it has become a celebration of literature and ideas that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, and tens of millions online. For a week, authors can feel like rock stars, drawing huge crowds on open-air stages. But it is not just scale that makes this festival different from any other. Something unusual happens here every January, a heady mixing of people and ideas that makes culture feel vibrant and alive. What’s the secret of this festival’s success? The answer matters since JLF, as it is widely known, has much to teach those of us who work in culture and the arts.

Giant puppets lead the opening ceremony of the 2026 Jaipur Literature Festival, widely described as “The Greatest Literary Show on Earth.” Photo credit: Martin Puchner.

There are some obvious answers, and some less obvious ones. One is celebrities, which doesn’t just mean famous authors and Nobel Prize winners, though there are plenty of those, but also Bollywood stars and influencers. Another ingredient is radical openness. With basic tickets entirely free, Jaipur attracts the greatest imaginable variety of visitors, many of whom drive in on scooters or hitch rides from far away. Hundreds of young literature enthusiasts volunteer as helpers; they both manage the crowd and are part of it.

Most astonishing to me has always been the fact that some portion of visitors do not, or even cannot, read literature. What draws them to a literature festival? The fact that JLF turns literature into an event. Literature here is performed, enacted before our very eyes, as ideas are debated and come alive. The organizers have a knack for finding the right people and matching them up in intriguing ways. The author of a book on mushrooms meets an Indian politician; a publisher of an important imprint talks to the inventor of the Internet. There’s always a fair amount of improvisation. Once, I was asked to fill in on a panel about the blue economy with just enough time to google what the blue economy was. (It’s the water-based equivalent of the green economy.) Over time, I’ve learned to go with the flow, so to speak, and trust that the organizers know what they’re doing. It’s all part of the JLF vibe.

Then there’s the music. Every day begins and ends with a musical performance. A Carnatic violin player might entrance audiences using an originally Italian instrument that migrated to India in the 18^th century, only to be incorporated into several Indian performance traditions. The morning performances are among my favorite moments because it feels like I’m being tuned for the rest of the day, put in a more receptive mood. (The most important Indian treatise on music, the Natyashastra, focuses on nine rasas, or modes, that evoke different emotions. Somehow, I suspect that this theory of music is being put into practice at the festival.) The evening performances are grander. Over the years, I have discovered some of my favorite bands, including Afro Celtic Sound System, itself a JLF-like combination of African and Celtic traditions.

Finally, there are the food and tea stalls; the booths for buying jewelry, bags, and clothing; and, of course, an enormous bookstore, or rather, book tent, which contains books and more books, books neatly arranged on shelves, books in enormous piles on tables, books in boxes and books just fresh from being signed by their authors. JLF is a marketplace—as well as a marketplace of ideas.

For people like me, who worry that people aren’t reading anymore, coming to Jaipur is the perfect antidote to cultural despair. That so many people of so many kinds go out of their way to participate in cultural events demonstrates an enormous yearning for culture. But the success of JLF also throws into relief how seldom this yearning is satisfied by our existing cultural institutions, from museums, libraries, and universities to other literary festivals. Compared to JLF, they feel exclusive, expensive, old, heavy-handed in all kinds of ways, and siloed.

The unlikely success of JLF has not gone unnoticed. My colleague Tarun Khanna, who teaches at the Harvard Business School, wrote a Harvard Case Study on JLF. When the first iteration of the case study was published in 2011, the question was how the festival, which had grown rapidly beyond its modest origins, would develop in the future. The answer today is: it has gone global. In recent years, JLF has spawned satellite festivals across the world, including the US, with locations in North Carolina, Seattle, Boulder, Houston, and New York City.

In keeping with my recent post on South Korea and Bhutan, one might wonder whether JLF’s increasingly global reach should be described as part of India’s soft power. JLF is unmistakably an Indian institution and it has been bringing Indian culture to many places around the globe. To this end, it has strategically connected with diasporic South Asian communities across the US, as well as with other local writers and institutions, from museums to libraries. Let us hope that part of the JLF magic will rub off on these US institutions.

But unlike recent success stories in soft power such as South Korea or Bhutan, JLF isn’t the product of a government-funded infrastructure that was fostered over decades, as was the case with South Korea, or a national campaign spearheaded by a head of state, as was the case in Bhutan. JLF is the unlikely story of a single festival becoming so successful that it has inspired other smaller festivals across India and is now projecting its influence abroad. In this way, JLF is bundling the enormous cultural richness of South Asia, its history as well as its current crop of writers, artists, opinionators, publishers, and entrepreneurs, and is showcasing this richness around the world.

Cultural Diplomacy on the Island of Ireland

JLF isn’t just a case study in how a single cultural institution can emerge out of nowhere and become a cultural player. It’s also a case study in how such an institution can use its newly gained power for other purposes, above all, cultural diplomacy.

As part of its global reach, JLF has been hosting a festival in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for several years, creating a rare occasion for writers from both sides of this divided country to come together. The Belfast edition of JLF has been a quiet but effective act at cultural diplomacy.

But now JLF is going considerably further. A few weeks ago, during the most recent iteration of the festival in Jaipur, the organizers announced that they would be hosting the first “all-island edition” of the Irish festival this coming May. This is more than just a change in name. The “Island of Ireland JLF” will begin in Belfast and then move on to Armagh and Dundalk before ending in Dublin, thus crisscrossing the entire island. This kind of movable feast would be a great experience for pretty much any place, but it is especially significant in Ireland, where deep divisions have made cultural collaboration almost impossible.

The importance of this type of cultural diplomacy is difficult to underestimate, and it is instructive to think about how JLF pulled it off. Some other cultural institution, of which there are so many in Europe and the United Kingdom, could have tried to launch an initiative of this sort, but none did (or succeeded). It took an outsider with a global brand to initiate this kind of cultural mediation, in addition to willing local partners, which include the government of the Republic of Ireland and the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

India and Ireland, of course, aren’t strangers. They have long-standing ties, many of them established by their respective relations to the British Empire. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it took an outsider who wasn’t quite an outsider, an institution, like JLF, that had ties to Ireland but was not directly entangled in the current conflict, to effect meaningful change.

I don’t think cultural diplomacy was something the festival’s founders envisioned as their goal when they began the festival nineteen years ago. But it is something they have grown into and are now embracing as a role that is theirs to play. In keeping with this new mission of the festival, I noticed an especially large number of diplomats and politicians this year—I ran into an average three ambassadors per day—who are clearly attracted by the power of culture to be found here.

When I asked co-founder Namita Gokhale about the reasons for JLF’s unlikely success, she said: “Somehow we seem to get things right: JLF has a kind of grace.” I love this formulation, and would only add that this grace has been extremely well earned.

P.S.

I realize that I am reporting on a literature festival without talking about actual books. I will make up for this unforgivable omission in a future post. Stay tuned.